B2B sales teams - How to be successful

Elements of a successful sales team

A high performing business to business (B2B) sales team is essential to business success. Effective sales strategies ensure the sales team forms strong relationships with customers when selling products or services and also emphasises cross-team collaboration.

The landscape for B2B sales teams is now evolving as companies digitally transform, and many relationships are formed remotely. Many virtual sales teams have already adopted tools to help remote sales collaboration. In order to be successful in B2B sales, teams need to adapt to new methodologies and ways of working to continue strengthening relationships, maximising lead generation and closing deals with their customers.

Here are four habits of successful B2B sales professionals:

#1 Set goals and measure achievements

What gets measured gets improved. Teams with a high B2B sales success rate define their aims, set goals and consistently measure achievements. A high performing sales team regularly evaluates and analyses targets like qualified leads, lead progression, average conversion rate and customer acquisition costs. They use these metrics in addition to traditional targets such as sales revenue and profit.

Leading B2B sales teams emphasise cross-collaboration within their business model and ensure to communicate their goals with the wider team, for example having a strong relationship between sales and marketing departments. Successful teams are often very particular about which leads they are working on, ensuring that their energy is focused on leads that are qualified according to particular criteria.

#2 Utilise technology to maximise potential

In order to ensure B2B sales success, teams need to invest in digitisation to improve their sales processes. Technology that reduces manual work has a clear benefit for B2B sales. According to Salesforce, sales reps can spend up to two-thirds of their time completing administrative tasks. These kinds of admin tasks are perfect for automation. Reducing manual tasks allows individuals to spend more time building customer relationships and maximising B2B transactions.

Sales individuals often waste time by rekeying information or using outdated contract templates. In the Forrester State of Systems of Agreement Research 2020, commissioned by Docusign, 54% of customers said that they had to duplicate work to re-enter data from contracts into systems of record. High performing sales teams use technology that is streamlined and that seamlessly integrates with existing workflows. Adopting electronic signature solutions can increase sales turnover times and help to eliminate errors.

#3 Focus on cross-team collaboration

Collaboration is key in B2B sales processes. High performing B2B sales teams often work alongside their counterparts in IT and operations to work more effectively using technology. Sales teams also require legal and compliance departments to approve sales agreements. Sometimes the approval process can slow down the completion of a sale. High performance teams look for opportunities to build improved workflows for sales, such as having pre-approved legal clauses to use throughout the proposal and negotiation process to reduce bottlenecks. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools can help streamline these processes and improve collaboration.

#4 Focus On Improving Customer Experiences

Good customer relationships equate to better sales performance. Business customers often have most contact with the sales team, and a high performing salesperson has excellent listening skills and empathy for their customer needs and motivations. It's important for a salesperson to build trust and to do that, they need to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Adopting digital technology can help teams focus on providing more personalised interactions, allowing them to promptly follow up conversations and to accelerate their B2B sales success rate. The Forrester State of Systems of Agreement study indicated that over 51% of organisations have a faster deal cycle, and 55% deliver better customer experiences after adopting digital technology. Integrating CRM systems with agreement tools can further enhance customer experiences and streamline sales processes.

Example of a digitised sales team in action: LinkedIn

Through implementing Docusign eSignature LinkedIn were able to simplify their workflow making it easier for LinkedIn's sales teams to collect all of the necessary customer information on contracts. As a result, the time it took to invoice customers decreased from 25 days to five—an 80% reduction. "With the click of a button, the system creates a contract for you to send to a customer, there's no uploading into Docusign. You just hit send and then it goes to the customer."

Brian Frank, Director of Global Enterprise Operations, LinkedIn

Implementing these 4 tips can enable your B2B sales teams to become industry leaders and improve the entire sales experience for both customers and sales employees. The Docusign Agreement Cloud can help sales teams improve workflows, adopt technology to improve customer relationships and track and measure goals.